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February 23, 2018
the Latvian state. It amounts to “a coordinated campaign by some of Latvia's commercial banks with the purpose of discrediting the Latvian state," he said.
At this point it may be worth mentioning that the independent governing council of Norvik bank includes former Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and former head of the German intelligence service August Gustav Paul Hanning.
The fishing trips to Kamchatka? Just salmon fishing trips on which you get met by a bus at the airport and billeted with a load of people you don't know, he said. That line of defence was repeated on a late-night interview show, along with a sug- gestion that he had been targeted because he
has been a leading force against the non-resident banks – a claim that does not hold enough wa- ter to catch a salmon. It is difficult to think of a
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speech he has made calling for the sector to be sorted out as a matter of urgency despite a verita- ble pile-up of money-laundering scandals over a decade.
The central bank these days likes to think of itself as a think-tank and has been offering unsolicited advice to government on healthcare, tax and edu- cation, but nothing on corruption. It is true that the central bank does not have direct oversight of financial institutions, but the governor does nomi- nate its head – current regulator Peters Putnins was a consultant to the central bank from 2005- 12.
Just as things started to settle and we began to anticipate the awkward silence when Rimsevics rocks up to his next session on the governing council of the European Central Bank, in blunders comic relief in the Falstaffian sword-waving figure